B2B Sales Does Better With Social Selling?

As much as social media is becoming popular at the same time, there is a growing misunderstanding of what social media can do for a business.

Let’s first review the social selling program:

Goal: To engage and impress the right people (target market). Stay informed on your prospective customer and customer’s happenings and events.

Social Selling Guide

Set-up the right social media platforms

Find the right people / target market

Create content that sells but doesn’t give away the farm for free!

Start a routine and this could mean a daily posting on your Business Page on LinkedIn and three daily tweets on Twitter and Facebook and a weekly blog posting on your site.

This is what leading-edge social media and public relations industry experts are saying you now need to do to generate and drive qualified leads to your website.

Take, for example the recent presentation from Mike Derezin, VP of Sales at LinkedIn, who shared this statistic:

Sales professionals who use social selling are 51% more likely to exceed their quota.

Evaluating Statistics

In general, when someone gives you a statistic for you to actually use it, they need to also provide the: who, when, where and why. In other words, this number is simply too vague to even be considered worthwhile data for you to add to your marketing mix.

Sure enough, it is an interesting number that ‘needs more research’.

Who’s talking?

Finding the right people is easy enough, it’s getting them to want to talk to you, that’s the challenge. The idea of social selling is that push and pull mix, partcontent generated by you (pull) and part you following & engaging with these right people (push).

But there’s one problem. The right people, the ones you actually want to speak too, most are not the ones using social media and I’m talking about the B2B industry. Most companies will have their marketing or communication department handle social media.

Add more!

You’ve probably noticed that you are now working on more than one platform, you’ve probably added Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. More likely, you’re thinking B2B is on Twitter! Sure, some are. Let’s evaluate:

You spend days searching for the right people on Twitter. You then spend more days and months tweeting your weekly blog posts, adding their tweets to your favourites, retweeting and shout-outs.

But, the right people are still not visiting your site?!

So, you invest in video production, get personal on your about page, and hire a social media expert and finally you start seeing more activity on your website and maybe, just maybe the right person will email you ….

Now, advertise…

Alas, truth be told, the number of right people is still not growing as aggressively as you want.

So, you’re looking at advertising on LinkedIn. They will show you how much data they have on the right people, like…

How much time you spend on LinkedIn…

When you’ve changed jobs….

Compare you to your competitors….

But, how many of the right people will I get by advertising on LinkedIn? I couldn’t find the answer.

Recommendation

Social media is a brand maker, not a selling tool.

Social media helps keep your brand visible.

Social media is a compliment to brand building, not part of your sales funnel.

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I am a marketing communications specialist, strategist, problem solver and founder of The Marketing Boutique. Services also include competitive analysis, public relations, content marketing to help companies reach their business goals.